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He won re-election as a Republican governor by almost 60 percent of the vote. He loved to talk about what he called the “Teamwork Government” he had brought to his state capital — especially when it came to contrasting what he and his tight-knit band of advisers deemed as the wild success and popularity of his Teamwork Government with the chaos of Washington.

He boldly went where other Republicans would not go, winning an unprecedented pledge of neutrality from the deeply liberal labor movement. Stunningly, of the 24 members of the American Federation of Labor’s endorsement board, 22 wanted to enthusiastically endorse him, the union finally declining out of respect for the remaining 2 members who favored his Democratic opponent.

I have been trying to explain Canadian scandals to people here in the United States, and believe me it’s not easy.

Oh, people get Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto. When he said he smoked crack, we understood. We still remember Marion Barry’s encounter with the DEA. And when Ford said he did it in one of his “drunken stupors,” well, we’ve all been there and done things we’d like to forget, haven’t we? I remember, back in boarding school, waking up the junior dorm at midnight. Not my finest hour.

As for “getting hammered down on the Danforth,” I’ll bet that that’s something a lot of Toronto’s Bay Street lawyers do, of a Saturday night. Then there was the "drunken ruckus" during a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game, where he shouted obscenities and insults until he was ejected. Perfectly understandable, if you follow the Leafs.

But let me ask, is that all they’ve got? Nearly 150 years as a nation, and all they have to show for it are a couple of drunks and a Toronto mayor who smoked crack? He’s not even from Toronto. He’s from the suburb of Etobicoke. Different thing entirely.

Leftists wishing a complete treatment of progressive chants, tics, talking points, sacraments, secret handshakes, and calamitous policies can find them in For the Next Generation, a tedious and repetitious 300-page walk through the entire catalogue of leftist delusions. Every failed idea since Rousseau is here lovingly lifted up as part of the path to an American paradise.

This over-long leftist catechism was ghost-written by Julie M. Fenster for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, an aged-in-the barrel leftist who is now a member of the U.S. House representing a South Florida district between Ft. Lauderdale and Miami, which includes South Beach. She’s also chairwomanperson of the Democratic National Committee, so readers can be assured everything she says here is party line.

As vince lombardi, among others, has delicately phrased it, winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.

That's what happens with absolute declarations: They get absolute real fast, to the point that, in political terms, it becomes challenging to discuss the prospect of Christopher James Christie as likely candidate for the Republican nomination for president. Christie duly walloped his Democratic opponent in last week's gubernatorial race, drawing majority support from women and minorities. Does that validate his possible candidacy for president? Would conservatives be happier if nobody liked him but those despicable Republicans-in-name-only?

An obvious truth lies at the surface of affairs. It is that nobody can say with the slightest accuracy how Christie will develop as a presidential candidate, if indeed he sets his mind on the quest. Political prophecies, delivered too far ahead of time, have a way of recoiling on the prophet. The prophecies of Inauguration Day, 2009, come to mind in this respect. What ever happened to St. Barack, healer and visionary?

Third parties have had an unbroken record of failure in American presidential politics. So it was refreshing to see in the Tea Party an insurgent movement, mainly of people who were not professional politicians, but who nevertheless had the good sense to see that their only chance of getting their ideals enacted into public policies was within one of the two major parties.

More important, the Tea Party was an insurgent movement that was not trying to impose some untried Utopia, but to restore the lost heritage of America that had been eroded, undermined or just plain sold out by professional politicians.

What the Tea Party was attempting was conservative, but it was also insurgent -- if not radical -- in the sense of opposing the root assumptions behind the dominant political trends of our times. Since those trends have included the erosion, if not the dismantling, of the Constitutional safeguards of American freedom, what the Tea Party was attempting was long overdue.

Here’s a joke for you: What is the difference between President Obama and New York City Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio? One is a so-called progressive who plugs damaging and divisive policies in the name of a misguided sense of “fairness,” seeks to punish the successful through redistribution, wants to expand an already bloated welfare state, has unsavory friends, and is even rumored to be connected to communism. The other lives in the White House.

Fellow spectators: We've come a long way. Since I founded The American Spectator in 1967, we've been jargogling liberals with wit and humor—and we plan to keep on in that tradition for many years to come. But the method of delivery has changed rapidly, almost as fast as the rotating the cast of congressional clowns, judicial jesters, and presidential pantywaists at whom we aim our jabs. There was a day when photos and articles for the magazine were cut and pasted—literally, physically—into place. A Facebook was a leather photo album, and a Yahoo was an uninformed Democrat (or in those days, maybe even an out-and-out Socialist or Communist).

Pundits in washington simply cannot decide about Ted Cruz. Does the Texas senator’s demagoguery more resemble that of Joe McCarthy (the New Yorker), or Father Charles Coughlin (MSNBC)? Was his fight to defund Obamacare a political version of General Custer’s last stand, or was it General Pickett’s charge (separate columns, both in the Washington Post)? Will Cruz hold the country hostage like the Taliban (the Daily Beast) or remake his party in his image like Vladimir Lenin (the Atlantic)? Should we imagine him as Don Quixote, the clueless would-be knight tilting at windmills (the New York Times), or as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, the 10-story minion of evil from the 1984 film Ghostbusters (the Guardian)?

Liberal commentator Chris Matthews was the emcee at the closing banquet of the annual International Churchill Conference last weekend in Washington, D.C. Citing the dedication earlier in the week of a Winston Churchill bust in the U.S. Capitol, with Republican and Democratic congressional leaders presiding, Matthews hailed Churchill as a rare unifying figure in partisan Washington. Of course, Matthews being Matthews, he still inserted a gibe against the Tea Party.

Afterwards, Matthews’ loud voice could be heard in the hotel men’s room, where a dinner participant had confronted him about his Tea Party comment. Attentive men in tuxedos circled around to hear the confrontation in front of the lavatory sinks as Matthews defended himself. So indirectly, maybe Churchill still provokes controversy.

Few reputations in jazz are more secure than Charlie “Bird” Parker’s. Miles Davis is said to have quipped that “You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.” Hundreds, if not thousands, of Bird discs, from budget-priced compilations to $300 deluxe boxed sets, are in the catalogues of various record companies. Modern students of jazz, trombonists, guitarists, and saxophonists alike, painstakingly transcribe and commit to memory his spontaneous solos, searching through alternate takes and obscure bootleg recordings in the hope of internalizing the idiomatic language of bebop.

Testifying on October 30 before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the cost to date of the federal government’s malfunctioning HealthCare.gov website is $174 million -- “about $118 million on the website itself and about $56 million has been expended on other IT to support the web.”

And it still didn’t work, and still doesn’t. The big news during the morning as Secretary Sebelius was heading over to the Congressional hearing was that the repeatedly bombing website was conked-out yet again. Throughout the three and a half hour hearing, the HealthCare.gov registration page was inaccessible.

Secretary Sebelius told the House committee that the website would be all fixed by November 30, but she also believed the website’s contractors and was convinced that the HealthCare.gov website was all ready-to-go for its promised October 1 launch date.

Private “Rondi” Rondinoni had been in B Company for a little more than one hitch (three years). He had reached the rank of Private First Class (PFC), but was busted back to buck private for repeated fractures of discipline. It didn’t matter to Rondi. He just enjoyed being a soldier. It drove his platoon sergeant crazy, but his captain -- the company commander--intervened to keep Rondi from being booted out on a Section 8 (mental illness). Back in the late 1930s, before Pearl Harbor and the draft, a U.S. Army company often consisted of less than seventy men; eager EM’s (enlisted men) were not readily available at $21 per month, even during the Great Depression. Rondi could read and write English and loved his apparently always forgiving captain.

President Obama's foreign policy record remains intact. Across the world from which he is withdrawing American power and influence, governments are recognizing that where once a superpower resided, now only a shadow remains.

First it was left to the Communist Chinese to admonish us against spending too much. Then they began a campaign to replace the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. The French led us into Libya because they needed to protect their oil interests there. Then Vladimir Putin bamboozled Obama into an agreement on Syria which goes against America interests by enabling Assad to remain in power while Iran flexes its muscles there. And that was after Putin suckered Obama into a new nuclear arms agreement that went against American interests and prior well-thought-out policies.

Now, Obama is eagerly chasing Iran, like a puppy chasing a ball, seeking an agreement that would relieve Iran of economic sanctions without doing anything to slow or stop Iran's march to nuclear weapons.

It is wrong, of course, to take pleasure in the misfortune of others. Still, I must confess that I have derived no small amount of schadenfreude from news stories about Obamacare advocates who have been adversely affected by the not-so-Affordable Care Act. It would take a stronger man than yours truly to suppress a smile as the law’s media pimps pule about their canceled health plans, when smug urban progressives get mugged by the reality of “reform,” and lifelong Democrats publicly denounce President Obama as a brazen liar while declaring their intention to become foot soldiers for the Republican Party.

IN HIS 1951 book God and Man at Yale, the document that, to simplify only a little, launched the conservative movement, William F. Buckley, Jr. lamented what he later called “the phenomenon of the somnolent college trustee.” Looking back in 2007, Buckley concluded that little had changed in the intervening 56 years. “Mostly, the college establishment is regnant,” he wrote. “Trustees are expected to be affable creatures, preferably rich and generous. They are not expected to weigh in on college affairs, which are adequately handled by presidents, provosts, deans, and lesser administrative folk.”

ThursdayScary. A friend appeared early in the morning to show me pictures of women who had answered his ad on a dating website. They were unhappy looking people. Not so much unattractive as frightening looking. These were mostly women 60 plus. My heart truly bleeds for them and for the men trying to befriend them. It is really hard to be lonely and it takes a toll on women’s facial features. They look like they have been in prison. I know I am a pitiful fat old man. I don’t think I look as if I have been in prison though. Maybe I do.

Yes, indeed. Maybe I do. I am in a sort of prison of fear about going broke. That’s my obsession.

Anyway, off to DCA to wait for my flight to ORD. I was afraid it would be a long, boring wait but I was pleasantly surprised. A simply beautiful young lawyer with the same first name as my wifey sat near me and we talked animatedly about the law for about an hour. She was as good at conversation as a person can be and also had a cheerful, flashing smile.

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